Librarian and philosopher Mark Lenker is the author of The Human Relationship with Information (Routledge), a series of short, reflective essays that explore information literacy through a philosophical lens.
I recently had the chance to speak with him about the inspiration behind the book, its central themes, and what he hopes readers take away from it. I hope you find the topic as interesting as I do. My interview with him is below.
Please introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. That means I do a lot of work to help undergraduate students refine foundational information literacy skills and concepts as they take on their first research experiences at the college level.
Before I got into libraries, I thought I wanted to be a philosophy professor, so I undertook a PhD program in philosophy. As I was completing that work, it became clear that academic philosophy was not the path for me. Library work has turned out to be a wonderful Plan B for me. As a librarian, I have learned and grown and contributed as a faculty member for about 20 years now.
But it’s not as though I ever really left philosophy behind. Nearly every day, philosophy still pops out of my past to shape the work that I do in libraries. The Human Relationship with Information is a marriage of these two passions. The book is essentially philosophical reflection on questions that have come up for me in library work.
I also enjoy helping others with their writing projects. I especially enjoy helping experts clarify their writing so that newcomers can appreciate it. I get to serve as a second pair of eyes for writers in my role as editor for the “Reports from the Field” feature in the journal portal: Libraries and the Academy. Readers, if you have an idea for a feature essay that you would like to explore further, please reach out.
Briefly summarize The Human Relationship with Information.
The book is a collection of short essays loosely built around the question of how information might contribute to or detract from a meaningful human life. The essays cover a range of questions – here are a handful:
- What is common sense, exactly, and can it help us evaluate information?
- Learning outcomes or intellectual virtues: What do I want for my students/patrons/users?
- How can I get the most out of my reading experiences?
- How do I read the news without becoming resentful and hopeless?
The book is hard to summarize, but I can share three themes that informed my outlook as I was writing it:
- Humans have a limited time to consume information, and we don’t know when our time is up. What are our priorities for spending time with information? Our time does not go on forever.
- Humans are prone to error in creating information and learning from information. How should our relationship with information reflect our fallibility?
- We often think of information as something that we manipulate, like a tool we can pick up when we need it and put back down when we are finished. But information plays a more elemental role in shaping our lives. The library scholar Dane Ward describes us as “fish swimming in an information ocean.” So, information isn’t just something external that we use – the information that we interact with shapes our ideas and outlook. It’s a complex relationship.
Why did you decide to write this book?
I very much enjoy the Essays of the 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne. His work is remarkably engaging because he writes from a very personal perspective. Reading an essay by Montaigne is kind of like getting a letter from a friend who shares his thoughts without inhibition. I wanted to try something along these lines, but with a focus on questions that come up as I think about my work in libraries. (This makes me very different from Montaigne, who was bold enough to write about nearly anything.)
At times, I would have doubts about whether personal essays were a good fit for a library audience or whether the questions I wrote about would resonate with anyone. At such times, I would look at essays by Michael Gorman or Barbara Fister and be reminded that essays and library work can go together remarkably well. As a profession, we prize evidence-based scholarship and best practices to guide our work, but we reflect as well.
A lot of library workers find themselves working in libraries because they love books and reading. I wanted to write a book about library work that these sorts of readers would enjoy.
How does emerging technology, including artificial intelligence, impact how you see humans engaging with information?
In the book, I have a couple of chapters on intellectual virtue, so I will take an intellectual virtue angle on this question.
In his introduction to Ritchart’s Intellectual Character, David Perkins suggests that many of the mistakes people make are not a matter of people lacking the intellectual ability to avoid errors. Instead, it is more a matter of people lacking the motivation to apply their abilities as the situation requires. They have the intelligence and skill to get things right, but they fail to muster the effort. In other words, the problem is a matter of intellectual character.
I think it would be an important line of inquiry to see how the use of emerging technologies, especially generative AI, affects our motivation to pursue excellence. Does generative AI make us more likely or less likely to apply effort or restraint as we engage in learning and problem solving?
I suspect that the answers will not be the same across all forms of intellectual virtue. For example, do the web-searching abilities of a sophisticated generative AI research assistant tend to make us more intellectually curious or less curious? Would the same AI make us more likely to jump to conclusions or less likely? I can imagine having a powerful AI genie at our beck and call might make us both more curious about the world but also more likely to believe whatever the AI tells us.
I think the ready availability of technologies like generative AI makes it more urgent for us to form an image of what intellectual character should look like in the 2020s and 2030s. We need to be able to evaluate new technologies on the basis of whether they bring us closer to excellent intellectual character or whether they tend to lead us further away.
Note that excellent intellectual character probably does not mean the person who gets the most things done. Instead, it’s a question of who makes the most creative contributions? Whom do we trust to give us realistic responses to difficult questions? Who perseveres and grows over the course of a long and meaningful career? Who are the people whom others regard as valued mentors?
If we can learn how those sorts of people include emerging technologies into their work, then we will have some models for how to use emerging technologies to make our own lives better.
In the meantime, I recommend using the same questions reflectively. Is this new technology making me a more insightful, more trustworthy learner, or is it just making me better at being busy?
What are two things you hope all readers take away?
I hope that this book will help knowledge workers look up from their to-do lists from time to time and wonder about the ways that people learn from information – not just to find better ways to do more of what we are already doing – but because humans and information are mysterious and interesting in their own right.
I also hope that readers will have a good time with the book. I wrote the essays with the aim of introducing a lot of ideas clearly but quickly, without beating any of them to death. My hope was to do something approachable and thought-provoking rather than dive into the technical details required to settle any of the questions once and for all. I hope that readers enjoy that about the book, and that some of the questions I pose in the book will haunt my readers. Maybe they will pursue these questions further than I have.
What do you wish all today’s librarians knew about information?
If I had the chance to say something to all of today’s librarians, I would say thank you for all of your thoughtful work. From my corner of the world, the zeitgeist seems to include two factors that can be tough on libraries: (a) growing hope and trust in automated technology like generative AI and (b) a diminished comfort level with asking people for help. Both of these factors make it less likely that librarians in all types of organizations will get the chance to help people navigate their information needs. Instead, users may opt to let AI assistants help them pull together answers from whatever is available on the Web.
Also, the free dissemination of information has political implications, even if librarians aren’t trying to sway users politically, and the political tension of the present moment puts added pressure on library workers. So, thank you, library workers, for sticking with it and finding ways to stay relevant and helpful in these disorienting times.
Regarding information, I find it inspiring, even quietly thrilling, to reflect on the mysterious ways in which the documents we work with actually change the ways that people think. I recently finished the book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco. Delbanco introduces the idea that, even if you have an expert teacher and a willing student, there is no guarantee that they will understand one another. There is still some inexplicable third factor (Delbanco calls it “grace”) that determines whether the teacher’s idea, however expertly delivered, will click for the student.
I think the same is true when it comes to communication through the types of documents that libraries provide – it still takes something like grace for the creator’s thoughts to resonate with the audience’s thoughts and feelings – it doesn’t happen automatically.
It is inspiring to think of library work as work on behalf of that kind of grace. By keeping libraries of all kinds vibrant and easy to use, we increase the odds that the ideas in a book or video or magazine will find an audience who is ready to be changed by them.
This is why I think of library workers as educators. It is this aspect of our role that keeps me excited about the work year after year.
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